JANM In The News

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Sipho Mabona, the talented origami artist we've featured here and here, just tipped us off to his newest installation. Now showing at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles until August 26, 2012 is The Plague, a fantastic swarm of locusts made entirely out of money!

As he says, "Money, our prime signifier of both ambition and perdition. Money has gone from being an elementary medium of exchange to being a means of exploitation: a colossal cloud of hot money [and incomprehensible financial instruments] buzzes above the global economy like a biblical swarm of locust. Thus money as bane. Yet money per se, plain as the one-dollar-bill, always retains its basic ability to function as a pragmatic unit of accounting for goods and services. Hence money as blessing."

Remember those radical underground rags of the late 1960s? The East Village Other. The Berkeley Barb. The L.A. Free Press. Gidra. Wait… Gidra? Wasn't that a monster in those dumb Godzilla movies? Yes, but just because he tried to lay waste to Japan and the rest of civilization, Gidra wasn't all bad. Which is how [...]

Long before he was Mr. Sulu on Star Trek, actor George Takei had to face a harsh reality. At the age of 5, Takei was one of more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent who were order into interment camps during World War II.

The 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 marks one of the saddest tragedies of our great country: the compulsory expulsion from their homes and false imprisonment of Americans of Japanese ancestry on U.S. soil during World War II. The signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942, is often seen as the first domino to fall in a chain of xenophobic and racist events against Japanese Americans during the war. Lessons were learned, yet even 70 years later, the Japanese American National Museum and the Anti-Defamation League continue to witness acts of bigotry, xenophobia, and racism.

Editor's note: George Takei, best known for his role as Mr. Sulu in "Star Trek," was gracious enough to speak with Geek Out for nearly an hour and a half. Last week, we talked about why "Star Trek" fans are thankful for Takei. This time, Takei gets personal about his acting and activism.

Behind George Takei’s great laugh, warm smile and enticing sense of humor is a childhood filled with memories of imprisonment.

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - A pristine 1963 Chevy Stingray Corvette sits on the first floor of the Japanese American National Museum. With its silver body and red interior, it acts like a magnet for museum visitors such as 28-year-old Joshua Holloway, who on a recent weekday afternoon stared into the window at the classic American sports car.

"It’s beautiful. It’s definitely a work of art," said the South Gate resident.

While its function is as a machine, Holloway is not the only one who thinks of the vehicle in artistic terms. That comes into play in the recently opened JANM exhibit Drawing the Line: Japanese American Art, Design & Activism in Post-War Los Angeles.

The Corvette is one of hundreds of items on display at the museum through Feb. 19. The exhibit looks at the influence that Japanese American artists, whose sense of culture and identity was influenced by the post-World War II period from 1945 to 1980, have had on the Los Angeles art scene.

The wall text at the beginning of "Drawing the Line: Japanese American Art, Design & Activism in Post-War Los Angeles" at the Japanese American National Museum describes how California’s reputation as the land of endless possibility and optimism was experienced a bit differently by Japanese Americans returning from World War II internment camps. Most of the works by the show’s 10 featured artists, designers, and performers reflect a certain dissatisfaction with mainstream modes of representation and attempt to counter them with images of their own, both so-called “positive” ones and others that are more ambivalent and questioning.

For a show with only 10 artists, "Drawing the Line" covers a lot of ground, from Matsumi Kanemitsu’s blend of Japanese brush painting techniques, Abstract Expressionist flourishes and Pop art content, to Qris Yamashita’s whimsical repurposing of Japanese woodblock print motifs in posters and T-shirts for community events, to artifacts from the career of dancer turned activist and folksinger Nobuko Miyamoto.

C-SPAN interviews Japanese American National Museum volunteer Bill Shishima and follows him on a tour of historic Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles. In a separate video, Bill also provides a short tour of part of the Museum's core exhibition, "Common Ground: The Heart of Community".

The Japanese American National Museum is going through its second leadership transition since 2008, this one promising to end with the ascension of a new generation at the Little Tokyo institution. Both its past directors had been on board since before it opened in 1992.
Museum officials announced this week that Akemi Kikumura Yano has stepped down as executive director after nearly three years, and that two of her deputies will serve as interim co-executive directors while a national search goes forward to find a new leader.

Having a very mixed feeling after the First Los Angeles International Tea Festival...
This tea event is a great success for its First year.
The reason this event is successful, per my personal observation: